


Sing Me To Sleep

by mintpearlvoice



Category: The wicked & the divine
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canon Related, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-08 23:36:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3227750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mintpearlvoice/pseuds/mintpearlvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva will finish this tour even if it kills her. Anything to avoid disappointing her parents. But Baal Hadaad doesn't intend to let her slip away so early on...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing Me To Sleep

"Uh-huh," Dad says into his cellphone. "Have your people talk to my people. We'll get the logistics all worked out." He snaps it shut. "Molly, sweetie, I've got great news. Your mommy and I have booked you a tour! We're driving to the airport right now."  
Minerva, in her car seat, rests her head against the window and nods weakly.  
"Aren't you going to thank us?" Her mother prods.  
"Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad."  
Ananke's explained it to her. The reason the gods only have two years is that you just can't contain divine power in a mortal vessel longer than that. It's like putting a nuclear bomb in a lunchbox- painful, and people die.  
And on one hand, this incarnation is pissed that she'll never get her John Hughes high school life. But it might be peaceful, she thinks, to be dead.  
Three-hour meet-and-greet before the show, pretending everyone she talks to is her new best friend and they'll be let into her snarky hipster fashionista world of too cool to be true.  
Two-hour set, and with her armor on she manages to shake her shivering bony body into some semblance of warlike and well-being life.  
Four hour photo session afterwards. She smiles and smiles like a corpse.  
Afterwards she hosts video chats, updates her media profiles, works on her subscription-only e-zines. She can blog in her sleep. She thinks she does.  
It's on the fourth carousel of it all that the pain in her chest becomes too great to ignore. She stops and leans against the hotel room doorframe.  
"Hurry up, Molly, we don't want to keep the limo driver waiting."  
"Mom," Minerva tells her. "I... my head feels..."  
That's when the world starts flickering, turning gray as her eyes. She drops to the floor. Drops her head in her hands.  
"Hold on, honey. I'll be right back."  
High-heel footsteps and then "here, drink this."  
It's so sweet it burns. Fireworks go off in her head. Her tongue feels thick. But by the end of the glass, she manages to pull herself to her feet. Her body feels distant, as if she's piloting a Jaeger. There's a buzzing in her ears and her heart wants out.  
"What'd you give me?"  
"Just a little medicine, sweetie pie. Come on, let's go."  
For the first time in days she feels awake, or something close enough to it. She bounces through the sharp dances and smirks at her fans.  
Everything blurs. She's floating. She drinks her medicine. She performs.  
Her hands shake all the time and behind her glasses her eyes are red.  
But Mom is happy. Dad is happy. So is she.   
And then one day at six in the morning before her big show with Baal, Minerva sits down on the couch to tie her boots and can't get up. She hears each slow heartbeat, badum badum. Gunshots in her ribcage. Grenades at her ears. Her head feels like it's being squeezed, and she can't breathe.  
But she can't make Mom mad.  
Minerva shuffles to the fridge on her hands and knees and drinks three bottles of juice and curls up till the shaking stops.  
She's backstage when it all hits her. A sudden sweat makes her clothes stick to her back. Even behind her sunglasses the light is too bright, and she has to put a small pale hand flat on the wall to keep herself from falling down. The floor sways under her feet, and when she tries to breathe her ribs turn into snakes and squeeze the flicker of her heart right as it beats.  
The makeup artist must notice, because she says, "Kid, you okay?"  
She's the farthest thing from okay possible. She's going to clock out early. Way early. But as long as the pain stops enough for her to sleep before she dies, she doesn't care.  
"I just need a moment," Minerva slurs. She pushes herself from the chair and stumbles towards dark.  
Curling herself in a blackout curtain, she wraps her arms around herself to ward off the next round of spasms. Even her eyes hurt.  
High heels on wood. She squeezes her eyes shut.  
"Molly Jones, you get up this instant right now! There's an entire paying audience coming here to see you do your little stunt, and if I have to give them their money back-"  
Minerva slaps her hands over her ears, but the noise goes on. Her mother grabs her and yanks her hands away, forces her to her feet. "Molly, drink your medicine and get out on that stage."  
"No medicine." That's what's making her sick, she knows it- keeping her awake, but making the whole world harsh and sharp. She tries to click her fingers, but they're too clumsy for the gesture. "No medicine... no stage."  
Sharp fingernails pinch her nose shut. Even gods have to breathe. Eyes blazing with fury, she opens her mouth-  
"Excuse me, Mrs. Jones." It's a quiet voice, yet low with barely-contained strength. It says I don't need to yell, because you will listen up right fucking now. "Please allow me to borrow your daughter."  
"Just a minute," Minerva's mom sings out, shoving the bottle into her daughter's mouth and tilting it up. Minerva tries not to gag, chokes anyway.  
"No. Now."  
A finger click, and words in lightning scrawl themselves across the air-  
Medicated picture perfect, numb belligerence  
Narcissistic craving for fame and all this decadence-  
Her mother falls away and Minerva spits out what she hasn't swallowed, and a mouthful of blood. The shaking is worse now, she can't reach for her power, she feels numb-  
"I got you," that same voice tells her, and she lets herself fall.  
The General of the Gods, grey-eyed Minerva, the one who as a midshipman had won a duel with only his violin bow-  
He hadn't expected them to look so fucking small. He'd seen pictures, but those bony pale arms, that wise sharp-eyed head on that teeny skinny couture-clad body- no one could look that fragile without photoshop, right? But the wisdom goddess is more delicate than she's ever been, her chest rising and falling too fast, her little body too cold in his arms.  
"Come on, Minerva," he breathes. "Come on, Mini- hold on just a little longer. Let's see what's wrong..."  
A simple spark of power tells him what he needs to know: the mom's been feeding her sedatives and Prozac to keep her obedient, then pure caffeine powder diluted with energy drinks, and she's burning up ichor just clinging to life. That accidental dose would kill a human twice her size. And it's killing her.  
He could burn this building with a thought. Burn her blasphemous so-called mother with much less than that.  
But he needs to stay calm, needs control, needs to think. Bodies are difficult, small broken bodies more than most.  
His only addictions are Crossfit and green smoothies, but more than once he's dragged Lucifers out of opium comas or Sakhmets off of catnip highs. Will his method work on someone this far gone? Still, he has to try..  
He splays a hand over her stomach (almost concave, too many ribs) and closes his eyes...  
Electricity, that's all the brain is. He can call up a current, jolt her bloodstream to purity, drop the bass at her heart-  
She's slipping away. He lassoes her with a luminous bolt and shouts into her soul.  
I can help you, Mini, but only if you want to live. Now that I've found you in this life, my ally, friend, my General, I can't lose you again. Not now. Not yet-  
Her small weak fingers grip his hand, like stone to fire. Don't let me go.  
No worries, Baal thinks back. I never do.   
One two three and the power roars through her, electric and wild. At the edge of her soul she feels rather than hears:  
"Never let 'em kill you, you take everything they give you  
And throw it right fuckin' at 'em and tell 'em it doesn't build you  
And no it don't ever break you, and no it can't overtake you  
Life's like a bed of roses, you take the thorns and you make do  
Sometimes you have to hurt for the cause to be reached  
But one day you'll be stronger than all that you beat-"  
Her body convulses. She shudders, rolls over, spits white fluid, her body ejecting pure caffeine with every cough. Baal soothes her through it, large hands warm on her back- yeah, there you go, you can do it. At last she sits up, shivering, and wipes her mouth. Her eyes fix on him, pure seagull-grey, frighteningly intelligent, and he suppresses a shiver.  
"Baal Hadaad. I know you."  
"And I you."  
She rolls her shoulders, tilts her head, less child than bird. "I suppose I haven't been myself for quite a while. I ought to thank you for restoring me to my full strength." She clicks her fingers, and her owl coalesces in the air and swoops down to his arm. "Haven't been able to summon my Odysseus up for quite a while. I was so out of it I forgot I could."  
"Yeah, well, you were more than just out of it. Not to scare you, but... I genuinely think you could have died. Your mother almost killed you."  
Minerva tucks her arms around herself and nods slowly. For a moment he thinks she'll cry, but her eyes are bright with intelligence, not with fear. "I... she's all I have. The only mother. The only manager. My strategy right now is one of attrition. Two more years and I'll be out, won't I? I mean... she's a valuable ally. She's my mom." She laces her fingers together as uncertainty flickers across her doll-like face.  
"Mini," he whispers, a broken half-note, and gathers her close.  
She falls asleep a few seconds later- a real sleep, not her prisoner-of-war drugged haze. It makes her look less like a little soldier and more like a chic-dressed grey-haired kid.  
When security comes barreling in a few seconds later, demanding to know why the two stars are not on stage, he flickers out lightning and puts them to sleep.   
Baal sneaks the kid through the back door and checks her into one of the hotel rooms that Inanna uses for his favorites. The whole time, even when he's parkouring one-handed through someone's back garden, she doesn't even flinch. When they're safe at last, she looks even smaller in the huge bed- tucked under the white cotton quilt, propped up on clean pillows. He sets up an electric ward around the corridor, but just in case, pulls a chair up to the door. He'll watch over the General until she wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> Baal quotes The Outsider and Angel Haze.


End file.
